75% of Americans believe this toxic idea about love ...Happy New Year!
Monday, January 1, 2024.
Intimacy is hard. We are children of the half-light. We need to have a more mature understanding about love so that we can better protect it, so it can thrive, as we strive.
Nearly 75% of Americans believe in the idea of soul mates: that there is someone out there who provides a perfect, unique fit.
Unfortunately, this kind of thinking may be toxic to intimate relationships, according to a pre-COVID research study.
Psychologists Spike W. S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz set out to look at two ways of thinking about love:
Perfect Unity: that two people are made for each other and are meant to be together.
Journey: that a couple are on a journey. Along the way they will have go through many trials and tribulations.
How the study was conducted
The researchers recruited humans who were in long-term intimate relationships. They surveyed them about times of both success and struggle in their relationship.
Some humans, however, had been subtly primed to think of intimate relationships more in terms of a ‘perfect unity’ with a ‘soul mate’ while other humans were primed in their family of origin to think in terms of an intimate relationship as a journey through time and space.
When these humans recalled their season of struggles, humans focused on the notion of “unity,” subsequently reported feeling less marital satisfaction than those who’d been thinking about their relationship as a “journey.”
There was no difference in their relationship satisfaction, however, when they thought back to the good times in their relationship history..
What is perfect unity, anyway?
Professor Lee explained:
“Our findings corroborate prior research showing that people who implicitly think of relationships as a perfect unity between soul mates have worse relationships than people who implicitly think of relationships as a journey of growing and working things out.
Apparently, different ways of talking and thinking about love lead to different ways of evaluating it.”
Is love is a journey, instead?
The problem is that it’s hard for some humans who hold a we are ‘meant to be together’ mindset to reconcile this romantic, but toxic notion with the idea that they sometimes they will be in unresolvable conflict.
On the other hand, those who believe love is a journey, hold a more flexible, adaptable belief. These humans will tend to see arguments and disagreements as part of the journey.
They may not enjoy the arguments or hard times any more, but they have the ability to hold a more adaptive perspective about rough patches.
The researchers specifically recommend that in moments of crisis it’s useful to recall your marriage vows:
“I, ____, take you, ____, to be my husband/wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward ’till death do us part.”
Thinking about this helps emphasise that love is not where you ultimately arrive, but rather what it’s defined by what you do along the way.
Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed for 2024!
RESEARCH:
Spike W.S. Lee, Norbert Schwarz, Framing love: When it hurts to think we were made for each other
Department of Marketing, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, 105 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3E6, Canada
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, 3620 S. McClintock Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90089-1061, United States
